ChatGPT takes on $globalevent are not examples of that. But they seem to be more favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm because of rather than despite how generic they are and how artificial their engagement boosting is.
As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.
Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.
Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.
Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.
LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t.
Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?
English speakers don't experience this, but in my language LinkedIn-speak has so many calques from English that, in order to understand it, I often have to translate words one by one to English and then the result back to my language.
At one of my past companies, I recall a recruiter disqualifying a candidate for a SWE role solely for having a "weird" headline banner image on their LinkedIn profile.
The "weird" image was a benign screenshot of a landscape backdrop of some Miyazaki film. No characters, no action sequences -- literally just trees, mountains, shit like that.
This is the kind of lunacy you're up against.
Nothing necessarily wrong with watching anime, but choosing to broadcast that on LinkedIn would generally demonstrate severely lacking judgement.
I think many if not most people will have negative associations when they think of adult anime enthusiasts, therefore most people with good social skills would not put anime on their LinkedIn.
I also probably wouldn’t want to hire someone who’s holding a gun in their LinkedIn photos (unless it was related to their work), even though I’m a hobbyist shooter myself. I think shooting is a cool hobby, but I understand that for many people it’s a weird enough hobby that it would be downright stupid to advertise it in an unrelated professional context.
The problem isn’t anime (or guns), it’s the poor judgement demonstrated by adding pointless question marks on what might otherwise be a good profile.
Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"? (I don't know; I've never used LinkedIn in any capacity.)
I think it really depends on the film. I doubt the expected value of putting a special background on your LinkedIn profile is very high.
people want to socialise in all sorts of contexts. think of it as hanging out at the bar after hours at a conference.